Insooni breaks racial barrier to become a beloved singer in South Korea

As she took the stage to perform in Carnegie Hall before 107 Korean War veterans, singer Kim Insoon thought of her father, an American soldier stationed in South Korea in the postwar decades whom she had never met or even seen.

“You are my fathers,” she told the soldiers in the audience before singing, “Father”, one of her Korean hits.

“For me, the United States has always been my father’s country,” Ms. Kim said in a recent interview, recalling that 2010 achievement. “It was also the first place where I wanted to show how successful I had become – without him and in spite of him.”

Born in 1957, Ms. Kim is better known as Insooni in South Korea, where she is a household name. For more than four decades, she has won fans from generation to generation with her passionate and powerful singing style and cross-genre performances. Fathered by a black American soldier, she also broke the racial barrier in a country that was deeply prejudiced against biracial people, especially those born to Korean women and African American soldiers.

Her enduring and groundbreaking presence in the South Korean pop scene has paved the way for future K-pop groups to globalize. multi-ethnic line-ups.

“Insooni overcame racial discrimination and became one of the few singers who are widely recognized as pop divas in South Korea,” says ethnomusicologist Kim Youngdae. “She helped introduce South Koreans to biracial singers and broke the idea that K-pop was only for Koreans and Korean singers.”

Thousands of biracial children have been born as a result of the security alliance between South Korea and the US. Their fathers were American GIs who fought in the Korean War in the 1950s or who protected South Korea from North Korean aggression in the postwar decades.

Most of their mothers worked in bars that catered to soldiers. Although South Korea depended on the dollars the women earned, society treated them and their biracial children with contempt. Many mothers gave up their children for adoption abroad, especially in the United States.

The children left behind often struggled while maintaining their biracial identity a secret if they could, in a society where until a decade ago schools taught children to be proud of South Korea’s racial “purity” and “homogeneity.”

“Every time they said that, I felt like I was being singled out,” Insooni said.

At school, boys pelted her with racist comments based on her skin color, said Kim Nam-sook, a former school friend, “but she was a star at school picnics when she sang and danced.”

Now that she’s a confident sixty-year-old, she’s started one Golden girls K-pop concert tour with three divas in their fifties.

But Insooni’s confidence turned to wariness as she discussed her childhood in Pocheon, a city near the border with North Korea. Topics she still found too sensitive to discuss in detail included her younger half-sister, whose father was also an American soldier. When she was young, she said, she hated it when people stared at her and asked her origins, wishing she were a nun. locked up in a monastery.

She said her mother had not worked in a bar and remembered her as a “strong” woman who took whatever odd work she could find, such as collecting firewood in the hills, to feed her family. Almost all she knew about her father was that he had a name similar to “Van Duren.”

The mother and daughter never spoke about him, she said. Insooni didn’t try to find him either, assuming he had his own family in the United States. Her mother, who died in 2005, never married. Due to the stigma attached to having biracial children, she lost contact with many of her family members. When young Insooni saw her mother crying, she did not ask why.

“We both knew going there that we were going to fall apart,” she said. “I learned it early on as a child: you have to do the best you can with the card you’re dealt, instead of staying down the rabbit hole and endlessly asking why. You can’t restore times gone by.”

Insooni’s formal education ended in high school. She and her mother then lived in Dongducheon, a city north of Seoul with a large American military base. One day, a singer who performed for American soldiers came to her neighborhood to recruit biracial backup dancers.

“I hated that city and this was my way out,” she said.

Insooni debuted in 1978 as the only biracial member of the “Hey sisters”, one of the most popular girl groups at the time. She said TV producers made her cover her head to hide her Afro. In 1983 she released her first solo hit: ‘Every night”, still a karaoke favorite for Koreans.

A breakdown followed. Ignored by television, she performed in nightclubs and amusement parks.

But her time in the entertainment world helped shape her artistic identity, as she honed her live performance skills and versatility, learning to sing and communicate with children, the elderly and anyone else who came to hear her.

“I don’t say to my audience, ‘This is the kind of song I sing, so listen to them,’” she said. “I say, ‘Tell me what kind of song you like and I’ll practice it and sing it to you next time.’”

She was constantly preparing for her comeback on TV. Whenever she watched a TV music show, she would imagine herself there and practice “songs I would sing, dresses I would wear, and gestures I would make.” Her chance came when the national broadcaster KBS gave her weekly ‘Open concert” to a multi-generational audience in 1993. Since then, she has been a sought-after singer.

Although she did not have as many original hits as some other top singers, Insooni often adopted songs from others, such as “Goose’s dream” and made them nationally popular, reviewers said. She continued to reinvent herself, taking on everything from disco and ballads to R&B and soul, collaborating with a young rapper in “My friend.”

“Many singers faded away as they grew older, but Insooni’s popularity only increased in her later years, with her status as a singer rising with songs that appealed to the entire generational spectrum,” said Kim Hak-seon, a music critic.

South Koreans say Insooni’s songs — such as “Goose’s Dream,” which begins “I had a dream” — and her positive onstage demeanor resonate with them in part because of the difficulties she has faced.

“You come to her songs for the first time and feel like you want to hug her,” said Lee Hee-boon, 67, a fan. “But in the end you feel encouraged.”

Insooni, who married a South Korean university professor, gave birth to her only child, a daughter, in the United States in 1995, making her a U.S. citizen, she said. She feared that if her child looked like her, she would face the same discrimination she did.

Today, South Korea is becoming increasingly multi-ethnic. One in ten weddings is bi-ethnic, as men in rural areas marry women from poorer countries in Asia. The farms and small factories cannot run without migrant workers from abroad.

One of South Korea’s most popular rappers – Yoon Mi-rae, or Natasha Shanta Reid – sings about her biracial identity. K-pop groups love NewJeans have biracial or foreign members as their markets globalize.

Insooni welcomed the change, but questioned whether the country was embracing multiculturalism “from the heart” and not out of economic needs.

In 2013 she founded Tuition Fee Free Hae Millschool for multicultural children in Hongcheon, east of Seoul, after learning that a majority of biracial children were still not attending high school, decades after her own school life ended so early.

During the recent interview at school, students on campus rushed to hug her.

“You can tell me things that you can’t even tell your mom and dad, because I’m one of you,” she told children at an entrance ceremony this month.

Insooni sometimes questions her decision not to look for her father. She once told South Korean military officers that if they were sent abroad, they should never do what American soldiers did in Korea decades ago: “spread seeds for which you cannot take responsibility.”

“At Carnegie Hall, I thought there might be a chance, however slim, that some American veterans might have left children like me behind in Korea,” she said. “If they did that, I wanted to tell them to take the burden off their heads. Whether they are successful or not, kids like me have all tried to make the most of our lives in our own way.”